A Two-Feet Long Diary: Month 2

Well, this is what one does when one is swamped with posts, isn’t it?! Even though now I haven’t been to school for five days (two-day weekend + three-day strike), I still feel busy as hell; perhaps exacerbated by my upcoming science fair project, due Friday, which I, uh, still haven’t started writing the report for. :|

So, here’s a post which has nothing to do with animanga (any manga, get it?) for once, by request of Flare: a post about feet!

(Well, he requested a post not about animanga, not a post about feet. Just to be clear on that.)

Anyways, that was my right foot, and here’s my left:

Yeah. Gonna tweak the video settings for now, but before you get creeped out, 1) I washed my feet before this! 2) Those feet-like-appendages aren’t my hands! Those hand-like-appendages are my hands! Nobody else is touching my feet! I really don’t know how you guys would parse my sentence like that! Actually, I suppose I do! 3) It really doesn’t hurt, I swear! Except when I twisted my left foot’s middle toe a bit, you can see me recoil for a few milliseconds! I really shouldn’t have twisted my left foot’s middle toe like that! 4) Don’t try this at home! Unless your feet are even more flexible than mine! In which case you are creepy! 5) Exclamation marks!

I suppose I ought to talk a bit more about what exactly the well I’m doing here. So I will. I’ve decided to improve my toe flexibility by moving them around. Eventually, I hope to be able to move my toes as dexterously as a two-week-old baby would move his stunted fat little baby fingers. Why? You see, when I was young, my dad ran over my feet with his bicycle. The doctor fixed my feet up real good but even now, I still have a… wait, hmm, I guess the scar disappeared. :V

Anyways, when I grew older, I was too lazy to buy new shoes, and my feet would always be squeezed into my shoes. As you can see in the video, my pointer toes (the equivalent of the pointer/index finger) are abnormally long, but when you take something that’s abnormally long and squeeze it in a confined area… it becomes malformed. Of course, inside these tiny shoes, my pointer toes have to bend into somewhere else (since they can’t extend straight forward), and so, I guess it shoved its way underneath my middle toes, which is why I can bend my pointer and ring toes (wait, ring toes?!) inwards, since they’ve been squeezed towards that direction for so long.

Obviously, this is… bad. You wouldn’t want toes like my toes. To be honest, I haven’t really seen other people’s toes (I’m not the type of person who goes around to steal people’s socks and shoes so that I can look at their toes), but when we were doing wrestling in P.E., I noticed that everybody else’s toes… were straight! None of them bent like mine did. Furthermore, I can curl my toes up into a fist-like position (see 0:53 on my right foot video), which others could not do; I suppose this is a side-effect of my deformation? I don’t even know if my toes are actually deformed (my doctor says they’re fine)!

So, this is the goal of my quest. If I can control my toes independently, I can /force them/ to stop bending, right? If I can control my toes independently, I can /shape/ my toes back to normal – not by squeezing their bones back into place, but by strengthening my toe muscles so that I can move them back into place /by will/.

Even if I won’t be able to do that, if I can control my toes independently, at least I’ll be able to play piano with my toes. And HOW FUCKING AWESOME WOULD THAT BE?!

I believe this justifies everything I have done.

—————————-

Anyways, onwards to the actual diary portion of this post.

It starts at Month 2 because I didn’t realize that I could POST VIDEOS OF MY FEET ONLINE when I started this project. Indeed, I started this project perhaps a year ago, but didn’t really work on it until two months ago. Here’s a rough timeline (which is wholly inaccurate):

Month 1: Started off by moving my entire foot up and down – the movement you use when tapping the beat to a song. This is really easy; anybody can do this… right?

Week 2: Now, tried to move just the toes up and down, keeping the ball of my foot on the ground. This is a bit harder, but I think anybody can do this if they try. Try to do it now – after one week, this was the only thing I could do. It’s the first type of movement I demonstrate in both videos.

Week 3: A week after doing that movement for, I don’t know, three minutes a day, I realized that I could move just my big toe up while all the other toes stayed down. Skip to about 0:25 on my right foot video, I think that’s a clear demonstration of this movement. Back then, I couldn’t actually move my other toes – I could only move my big toe up.

Month 2: Two weeks after moving my big toe up over my other toes (for, what, four minutes every other day?), I found that I could move my big toe down while my other toes stayed up. Basically, I lifted all my toes while keeping the ball of my foot on the ground, and then moved my big toe down (0:14 on my right foot video). If you try this immediately, you probably won’t get it – I ‘learned’ most of these by suddenly finding out one day that, woah, I could move a new toe in a new direction. It comes with practice, I think.

Month 2 Week 2: Now, instead of just moving my big toes over or under my other toes, I could move my other toes over or under my big toe! There seems to be no difference, but the muscles used are obviously different. With this, my feet are basically emulating a uncoordinated primate with nonopposable thumbs wearing a mitten. Hmmm, not very useful, is it…

Month 2 Week 4: By this time, I could combine both movements together, and have some semblance of control over my big toe and my other toes – for example, I can move my big toe over/under my other toes, and move my other toes over/under my big toe. I could also keep my big toe up while moving my other toes (as I said before, 0:25 on the right foot video), or keep my big toe down while moving my other toes (0:14 on the right foot video). I think that’s pretty good progress for just two months.

Today, coming out of the shower: I was just moving my feet like usual when I realized that my little toe on my right foot could also move by itself just a tiny bit (at the 1:00 mark on my right foot video)! In a burst of inspiration (and also because I just washed my feet), I decided to, uh, take a video of my feet or something like that.

And there you have it. Mushyrulez, signing off. Also possibly singing off. But I can’t sing, so…

Related

9 responses

Dude, you have flexible toes. Or whatever the equivalent of the bones in your toes is in tones of flexibility.
I think it’s weirder that other people touch your feet so freely versus it being your own hand.

Nothing really, you just mentioned not to get freaked out because those aren’t your hands and I thought that it’s weirder, for me, that it was someone else’s hand instead of yours. lol this face :| was funny.

Sucks about your school going through that Mushy, hope it gets resolved soon.

No, since Canada uses the metric system. Toe if I liked in America, maybe I’d foot up a project about height. No, my project’s about EPISTEMOLOGY, the STUDY of EPI-STEMS (you’re a political science student, aren’t you? do you guys have to take philosophy?)